Capital One Financial Corp. is competing with Silicon Valley for talent in software engineering, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, as it seeks to deliver on its mission to operate like a nimble tech company under the direction of CIO Rob Alexander.

Under pressure from other banks and fintech startups, Capital One currently employs 9,000 technology staff, up from 2,500 in 2011. It builds its customer-facing products with in-house talent instead of solely relying on third-party vendors.

“I think the great separator between the companies that survive in this digital transformation and the companies that are roadkill will be their ability to attract and retain great technology talent,” he said.

Building products in-house, such as the bank’s recently-launched digital chatbot, means that it can cater to its unique set of customers and iterate and adapt to customer preferences on a quick timeline. “This is a product that needs to constantly evolve,” Mr. Alexander said of the chatbot, Eno.

The bank’s move to the public cloud is another way it’s using technology to add competitive advantage, Mr. Alexander said. He’s helped spearhead an effort over the past three years to move the bank’s back-end software development tools and infrastructure to the public cloud. That way, he says, the bank’s technical staff can get software products to market faster, easier and with top-notch security.

“Everything we build is on the public cloud and that’s a very different operating model than other banks …. The speed and agility for building applications is much greater,” Mr. Alexander said.

CIO Journal’s Sara Castellanos spoke to Mr. Alexander, in a series of interviews, about the development of the bank’s chatbot, Eno, and the challenges and advantages of operating like a technology company. Read the full story here.